Includes vita and abstract. --- Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester, 2012. --- Includes bibliographical references. --- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Negotiating liveness at the Village Vanguard -- Chapter 2. Posthumously live -- Chapter 3. The records' apprentices -- Chapter 4. Outsiders looking out -- Chapter 5. Saving entertainment.
Museums, universities, and concert halls have asserted a strong presence in recent jazz culture that brings issues of historical preservation to the forefront of discussions about playing this music live. The notion of jazz as “America’s Classical Music” that emerged during the 1980s informs much of this institutionalization: jazz is now largely viewed as a significant form of art music based in American multiculturalism. While jazz is not a neatly unified style in terms of its specific musical traits, both scholarly and popular writers now routinely discuss it as a heritage or tradition. The ubiquitous phrase “jazz tradition” implies that jazz is a cohesive musical style because of its basis in a particular cultural history. My dissertation investigates how different versions of that cultural history are constantly renegotiated in the context of contemporary live jazz performances. Through a series of ethnographic and historical case studies of different jazz venues, I argue that the presentation of various notions of a jazz tradition has become a key aspect of defining the value of a live performance. This music’s presenters, performers, and audiences constantly situate what is played and heard in terms of a relationship to jazz history. In turn, specific communities or individuals hoping to reflect certain values through their presentations of the music continually reassess ideas about what constitutes jazz history. Two of the five chapters explore the world’s oldest jazz club, the Village Vanguard, and a new large jazz institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center. As changes in jazz education practices from an informal apprenticeship system to conservatory programs fuel many recent debates about the transmission of musical tradition, I include an analysis of how students at the Eastman School of Music learn the music of canonized historical players from recordings. The two final chapters juxtapose iconoclasts and preservationists in studies of an experimental music venue, the tone, and a Dixieland club called the Flower City Jazz Society, in order to convey the significance of anxieties over maintaining or breaking from tradition, even in situations where relationships to the past appear on the surface to be the most clear-cut.
